PRINCIPE DOS POETAS DE SEU TEMPO,
VIVEO POBRE E MISERAVELMENTE,
E ASSI MORREO,
ANNO DE MDLXXIX.
ESTA CAMPA LHE MANDA AQUI,
POR D. GONÇALO COUTINHO,
NA QUAL SE NAÕ ENTERRARA
PESSOA ALGUMA.]
[Footnote 158: We may remark that Camoens died while Cervantes was still
a captive at Algiers. He was dead when the Spaniard joined the army at
Lisbon two or three years after.]
[Footnote 159: "The poet's life is one of want and suffering, and often
of mortification--mortification, too, that comes terribly home; but far
be it from me to say that it has not its own exceeding great reward. It
may be late in coming, but the claim on universal sympathy is at last
allowed. The future, glorious and calm, brightens over the grave; and
then, for the present, the golden world of the imagination is around it
Not one emotion of your own beating heart but is recorded in
music."--_L. E. L._]
[Footnote 160: Doctor Southey has, in his article on the 'life of
Camoens', in the twenty-seventh volume of the "Quarterly Review," given
an account of the attack made by Jose Agostinho de Macedon on the
Lusiad, and the poem he wrote in rivalship on the same subject. Macedo
was an acute critic: as such, he could more readily detect defects than
beauties. He saw with discerning eye the faults of plan in the
Lusiad;--but he was not warmed by its fire, nor elevated by its genius.
The most entire vengeance a friend of Camoens could take, he himself
achieved when he wrote his poem, whose machinery and plan are no better,
and which possesses none of the transcendant merits of its predecessor.
To subvert a national idol, is an invidious task--to set himself upon
the same pedestal, a ridiculous pretension. A poet of the present day,
whom the Portuguese, of whatever political creed, agree in admiring,
Almeida Garrett, has written a poem, entitled "Camoens," worthy of his
great countryman.]
[Footnote 161: Fanshaw's poem was published without his own corrections.
Southey observes on this, that "though he might have sometimes improved
the harmony of his verses, and sometimes have changed a word or
expression for the better, the main fault is not one he was like to have
corrected," that fault being the imitating the Italian poets in mingling
familiar and burlesque expressions with the grave and ideal. This
observation is singularly true: the copy of sir Richard Fanshaw's Lusiad
which we have consulted, contains manuscript corrections in his own
hand. In this he has frequently changed a word or transposed it; but not
one of the faulty passages is amended.]